“That’s ridiculous,” James said, ready to tackle Davinia Carey from another angle. “A good attorney could pierce that clause without half trying.”
“You may be right.” Archer raised the brandy to his lips and let the liquor warm his throat again. “But for that to happen Thea would have to consult a good attorney and I can’t see her defying her grandmother in that way.”
Ilsa leaned forward in her chair. “But, Archer, you’re talking almost as if Thea was a minor child. She’s twenty-five and, even if she doesn’t want to challenge the trust, she must have other options.”
Archer inclined his head. “Perhaps. But we can’t discount the fact that Davinia is the only family Thea has, the only family the child has ever known. Berenson died young. Elizabeth, too. The half brother was nearly two decades older than Thea and I don’t believe she had much contact with him, even before his death. It’s unfortunate for Thea that Davinia is such a strong personality and that she puts such pride in her ancestry and heritage. She has always had very definite ideas about what society expects of a lady of wealth and position, although she didn’t used to be quite so implacable and stubborn. She nearly went mad with grief when Elizabeth died, but then there was Thea, and a second chance at raising a child. While it’s true that in our opinion, she simply went from one extreme to another, I’m sure in her mind she is protecting Thea from the excesses which killed Elizabeth.”
“Not everyone would agree it was excess that killed Elizabeth.” James walked to the fireplace and stirred the fire. “I’m sorry, Dad,” he said after a moment. “I’m just angry she’s made such a fuss and stirred up a tempest out of nothing. She’s acted as if Thea and Peter are adolescents and not responsible young adults. What they do in or out of their bedrooms is none of our business, and that should go double for Davinia Carey.”
“You’re quite right, James.” Ilsa’s soft assurance had a soothing affect, Archer could tell, and it pleased him to see his son respond to a woman with good sense, for a change. In the past several years, James hadn’t exactly chosen his love interests for their intellect and understanding. Now, however, it was beginning to look as if he’d come to his senses and realized what he’d been missing. “However,” Ilsa continued. “She has made it our business—well, at least, your business—because she contacted Archer to apprise him of what had happened and to demand that he present himself at Grace Place today to discuss what should be done.” Ilsa glanced at Archer. “I do hope you managed at some time this afternoon to persuade her this should remain a private matter.”
Archer smiled without humor. “Believe me, if this little contretemps leaks out, it won’t have come from Grace Place.”
“What would happen to the trust if Thea marries?” Peter asked suddenly.
“Marries?” James repeated. “I don’t think that’s a realistic option for her, Peter. I imagine Davinia would have taken steps to safeguard the trust against fortune-hunters and, while it isn’t a particularly tactful point to make, who else would marry Thea?”
The air fairly snapped to attention, jabbing the chilly finger of alarm right through Archer and piercing the warm glow of the brandy, as Peter turned from the window, his chin up, his eyes fierce in their determination.
“I would,” he said calmly. “In fact, marrying Thea is exactly what I intend to do.”
LEAVING THE LIBRARY before the shocked and satisfying silence could come to a rolling boil, Peter took the stairs two at a time. At the top of the first landing, he paused, then did something he hadn’t done in years. He jumped and high-fived the portrait of old Josiah Braddock. Well, in truth, he barely touched the ornate gold frame next to old Joe’s hands—Grandmother would have had a fit if any of them had ever actually laid a finger on the portrait. She had used to complain that her grandsons’ high spirits would be the death of her, but in the end she’d succumbed only to a heart worn out from happiness and a good long life.
Peter had taken his own sweet time after coming to live at Braddock Hall to observe his two older brothers. It had taken a good long while after that to work up the courage to try the high-five jump, even though he’d watched Adam and Bryce do it on almost every charge up the staircase. Touching that picture frame had been one of the coveted goals of his adolescence, and the day he’d finally grown tall enough and could jump high enough to high-five old Joe, had been one of the best days of his life.
A little like he felt today…proud of himself in a way he couldn’t have fully explained.
Marrying Thea is exactly what I intend to do.
He could hardly believe he’d even conceived the thought, much less voiced it aloud. But there it was.
In a few minutes, he figured James would be coming after him, wanting to know what maggot of insanity had bypassed his brain and come straight out of his mouth. Already, Peter could hear the rumble of voices…his dad’s edgier, rougher and more demanding than the other two, Archer’s reasoned response, Ilsa’s reassuring contralto. He wondered what they were saying, if they’d believed him, if they thought he’d simply been making a bad joke.
But it wasn’t a joke. Not at all. He’d been thinking the only way to get Thea away from her grandmother was going to be for someone to marry her when James had asked the question.
Who else would marry her?
Who, other than a man only interested in her money, would marry poor, ugly-duckling Theadosia Berenson?
And suddenly, Peter couldn’t bear the thought of Thea married to some ne’er-do-well with sunbleached hair, capped teeth, breezy manners, expensive habits and a taste for extramarital affairs. Someone who’d push her further into the background, further into herself and humiliate her in ways she’d never be able to defend against. In the long run, a marriage like that would be far worse for her than her present relationship with her hateful and domineering old grandmother.
Not that he wanted to marry Thea.
He didn’t want to marry anyone. Not for years and years.
But someone had to rescue her. She was locked up in the attic rooms of Grace Place as surely as if someone turned the key in the door every night. She was confined in the world her grandmother had created to keep her safe. Maybe his grandfather was right in his assessment of Davinia Carey. Maybe she was, in her way, only trying to keep Thea from repeating the mistakes her mother had made. Maybe she was simply protecting Thea as best she knew how. But whatever her motives, Mrs. Carey had only trapped Thea into a belief system that was neither healthy nor true. And being a gentle soul, Thea had come to believe she could not, should not even wish, to escape.
Peter knew how someone like Thea could come to think she had no other options. Hadn’t he watched his mother do exactly that in her own life? Hadn’t she convinced herself that in order to escape a bad and abusive marriage, she would have to sacrifice one or the other of her children? And in the end, hadn’t she died rather than make such a terrible choice? Peter had been angry about that for a long time. Angry with James for not rescuing all three of them. Angry with Catherine for not being brave enough to save herself and consequently, both him and Briana, his half sister. But most of all, Peter had been angry that he hadn’t done something, anything at all, to ransom them from his mother’s strong, but mistaken beliefs.
He took the remaining stairs at a pensive pace, thinking about Thea living in the attic room with cats for company and flowers for color with only an embittered and narrow-minded grandmother to love her. Growing up in that household with its cold, dark hallways and cold, critical air, it was a miracle Thea had a heart at all.
But she had a sweet and tender heart. He’d always known that, somehow. Just as he’d always thought that someone within their social circle ought to, and would eventually, do something to help her.
Saturday night had changed his thinking on that. He was that nebulous someone. He had to do something. Right or wrong, he could no longer pretend there was someone else to do it. Saving Thea might not be the best way of rewriting his own history,
but he felt responsible and as if he’d burst if he didn’t at least try to talk to her. After that…well, if the only idea he could come up with to get her away from Grace Place was to marry her, then that’s what he’d do. Crazy idea or not.
He wondered what his Grandmother Jane would say about it. She’d always reminded him to follow his heart, although this probably wasn’t exactly what she’d meant. Still, it felt like the right thing to do. His mother had always told him he must make his life count, that he was born to be a gentleman and that it was his responsibility in life to make certain he died a gentleman. “You’re a Braddock,” had been the end of every bedtime story he’d ever heard until he was nine and learned his mother hadn’t made up the stories she’d told him. When she died, he’d found out in a hurry that Braddock wasn’t just Catherine’s way of describing a chivalrous code of behavior, that Braddock was not a strange synonym for gentleman or another way of reminding him to be a good boy. Braddock was, in fact, the name of a family. His name, as it turned out, and his family. Although he’d really had very little understanding of what that meant, at the time.
When he reached his room, Peter went immediately to pick up the only picture he had of his mother. It was a snapshot, a close-up, taken at the beach some long ago summer. She was wearing a beach hat, holding it on with one hand while the wind tugged at her hair beneath the wide, sun-shading brim, and laughing at the camera as if she had not a care in the world. Peter liked to think even if he’d had dozens of pictures of Catherine to choose from that this would be the one he’d want to remember her by.
“She was a beautiful woman,” James said from the doorway. “Your mother.”
Peter nodded and set the picture in its silver frame back on the chest of drawers. “I was just thinking about her,” he said. “Wishing her life might have been different.”
“There’s hardly a day that goes by I don’t think about her and wish…well, so many things.” James leaned a shoulder against the dark wood of the door-jamb. “I wonder how all of our lives might have been different had she told me in the beginning that she was married. Or if later she’d mentioned Briana. Or if she’d only known she was pregnant with you when she left to go back to him. But none of those things happened. She chose what she chose, Peter.”
He knew it was true, had long since absorbed and accepted Grandmother Jane’s philosophy that assigning blame could only cloud the present without changing one single moment of the past. He did believe James hadn’t known about Catherine being already married when they’d met. And not until she died, about their son. “I know.” Turning away from his mother’s picture, he began unbuttoning his shirt. “But I don’t think you came up here to talk about my mother.”
“No, although there are times when I think every conversation you and I have ever had is about her.” He paused, straightened and drew away from the door, offered a hopeful smile. “What you said downstairs just now, Peter…you’re just angry, right?”
Peter shrugged out of his shirt. “I am angry, Dad, yes.” He walked to the closet and stepped inside, looking for another shirt, something suitable to wear while paying a call on a lady.
“Good, because I’d hate for you to think marriage is the answer.”
Peter came out of the closet, pulling on the shirt he’d chosen—a pale blue stripe.
“And believe me,” James continued. “I know what you’re thinking—I’m the last person in the world to be giving advice about who you should or shouldn’t marry.”
“That’s not what I’m thinking, Dad. I’m thinking I want to see Thea and talk to her.”
“Don’t ask for trouble, Peter. Davinia Carey doesn’t want you anywhere near her granddaughter. At least not now. Give this some time. Believe me, trying to talk to Thea right now is not a good idea.”
“I appreciate the warning, Dad.” Peter finished buttoning the blue-striped shirt, feeling—as he sometimes did with James—more like the adult in their relationship than the child. “But I need to talk to Thea and I’m afraid it can’t wait for a better time.”
James frowned, obviously anxious to say something to deter his son from making a big mistake. “Peter, stop and think about this. No matter what went on in that bedroom the other night, marrying Thea is not the answer.”
“I believe you.” Peter reached into the closet for his leather jacket. The rain on Saturday had left the outside air with a wintry crispness. “Don’t wait dinner for me tonight. This may take a while.”
“She’s a crazy old woman and she could shoot you on sight,” James said as Peter walked past him and out into the hall. “Which, come to think of it, might actually bring you to your senses.”
“It might,” Peter agreed cheerfully as he headed for the stairs. “But I doubt it.”
“STOP FIDGETING, THEA, and eat your dinner.” Davinia put down her fork and frowned at the untouched food on Thea’s plate. “I have no intention of allowing you to make yourself sick over this.” She nodded at the food. “Now eat.”
“I’m not hungry.” Thea saw no reason to choke down food she had neither asked for nor wanted. Besides, if she swallowed so much as a morsel, she knew her stomach would toss it right back up.
“Don’t be missish. I told you I spoke with Archer Braddock this afternoon and, while he wasn’t as shocked as he should have been, he has assured me that his grandson will not bother you again. We can forget this unfortunate incident happened and get back to normal around here.”
Normal, Thea thought. As if that was a good thing. As if normal had so much to offer. “Grandmother, nothing happened. Your talking to Mr. Braddock about it only makes it seem like something did.”
“I am not stupid, Theadosia. I saw exactly what was going on with my own eyes and right under my own roof. Frankly, the more you protest, the more convinced I am that you’re becoming as untrustworthy as your mother.”
“But Grandmother, nothing…”
Davinia held up a hand, the scowl she had worn continuously for two days intensifying. “We will not discuss this any further, Theadosia. I believe I have made my views quite clear on the subject and I consider the matter closed. You made a mistake by allowing that young man to talk his way into your bedroom, but I am willing to share some small part of the responsibility. I went completely against my own better judgment in allowing you to go out with him in the first place. While I have tremendous regard for Archer Braddock—which is the only reason I accepted his suggestion that Peter should be your escort on this occasion—I knew I should not have agreed. Peter may be a Braddock, but that whole scandal with his mother and the horrible man she was married to never rang quite true with me. There’s bad blood in Peter Braddock. You mark my words.”
“But, Grandmother…” Thea felt she owed it to Peter to at least try and defend him. But as had happened the other night, her words fell into the wake of Davinia’s suppositions and were ignored.
“Rest assured, Thea, I will be much more selective in choosing your escorts in the future.”
As if young men were lined up around the block waiting to ask her out. As if she wouldn’t have enough sense to choose a good one if they were.
“Now,” Davinia continued briskly, “eat your dinner. Sadie went to a deal of trouble to prepare some of your favorite dishes. The least you can do is be appreciative of her hard work and eat what has been set in front of you.”
Thea signed and picked up her fork. She could protest until she turned blue and she’d still never be able to generate the same passion, the same absolute authority that her version was, in fact, the truth. And although Thea didn’t think Sadie would be offended if she sent her plate back to the kitchen as full as it had come out, she didn’t want to risk making anyone else mad at her. It was easier to pretend to eat. Grandmother wasn’t one to turn a blind eye, whether it was how much food was eaten or what she had seen in Thea’s bedroom only two nights ago.
And what she’d seen was Peter Braddock, fresh from the shower, and unbearably, beautifu
lly, bare. Well, except for the towel. But Thea had thought that only added to the charm, the utter mystery of being alone with a man in her bedroom. She’d hadn’t, of course, had much time to enjoy the charm or solve any of the mystery. Not that there had ever been any chance she would. Peter wasn’t interested in her. Never had been. Never would be.
Which only meant she was sick to her soul over the scene her grandmother had made in front of him.
Of course, he wouldn’t bother her again.
He had every reason to stay as far away from her as humanly possible. No more duty dances. No more of his gentle teasing. No more moments when she felt almost as if he understood. She doubted she’d even catch a glimmer of his smile after this. And no one would think any less of him for it, either. She could imagine the gossip that could already be circulating.
Thea’s always had a crush on Peter.
She probably threw herself at him.
How embarrassing for him.
And after he’d been kind enough to take the poor thing to Angela’s wedding, too. Then to take her home and have her grandmother act as if he’d planned a seduction all along.
How awful that must have been.
But he’s such a gentleman, you know. I can’t imagine he’d have told Davinia Carey straight out that he’d have to be utterly desperate to even think about seducing her granddaughter. Thea? Teddy Bear Berenson? Can you imagine?
There’d be laughter then, Thea imagined. Because, of course, Peter was young, handsome, rich and so far from utterly desperate, even she could see the humor in such a statement.
Grandmother never saw much humor in anything though. She lived in fear Thea would become just like Elizabeth. Wild, reckless, irresponsible and…dead. It did no good for Thea to assure her that she was none of those things and had no inclination to follow in her mother’s impetuous footsteps. It was a settled thing in Davinia’s mind. Thea had inherited a streak of self-destructive and impulsive behavior and, sooner or later, if the proper precautions weren’t taken, it would show itself. Had shown itself, in fact, on Saturday night.
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